How racial hierarchy and bureaucracy are reshaping Jerusalem.
For Palestinians living outside Israel’s 1948 borders, life is precarious and heavily regulated by a persistent procedural violence that limits their freedom of movement and shapes daily life. In the West Bank, impediments on the freedom of movement take the form of physical checkpoints, roadblocks, and a massive network of walls and fences manned by heavily armed guards and state-of-the-art surveillance technology. For Jerusalemites who are not Israeli citizens but hold identity cards distributed to them when Israel annexed the eastern part of the city in 1967, mobility has been somewhat easier. And though maintaining life in Jerusalem presents a financial and political burden to many Palestinian families, it’s a hardship many take on, as they understand that living in Jerusalem protects them from the draconian permit regime that restricts the mobility of neighboring Palestinians in the West Bank. At least, such was the case until recently.
Today, Palestinians who are stateless, but residents of East Jerusalem face a new threat to their political rights and freedom of movement in the form of new legal and bureaucratic plans to reshape the city through the exclusion of hundreds of thousands of residents from its jurisdiction.
Palestinians who are stateless, but residents of East Jerusalem face a new threat to their political rights and freedom of movement.
The new plan is yet another instance in which the Israeli government has attempted to move Palestinians from East Jerusalem to the occupied West Bank. For decades, the policy of the Israeli Ministry of Interior was called the “silent transfer,” which consisted of ever-mounting procedural demands to prove one’s center of life was in Jerusalem, or have one's residency status revoked. The building of the separation wall in the early 2000s caused thousands of families who had lived in East Jerusalem, beyond the wall encircling the West Bank, to seek housing, work, and education within the wall. This put extreme pressure on education, sewage, and welfare infrastructure—systems that were underfunded and underdeveloped compared to their counterparts in Jewish Jerusalem.
The wall itself was justified by Israeli politicians, to curtail the violence of the Second Intifada, and in the last few years the very same politicians that invented the separation wall, such as Haim Ramon, began to promote racist campaigns to encourage the isolation of the Palestinian villages in Jerusalem. Following an outbreak of violent episodes that came to be known as the intifada of stabbings, Israeli politicians affiliated with Labor began to voice the possibility of redrawing the municipal lines of Jerusalem in order to exclude the Palestinian residents living on the Jerusalem side of the separation wall.
The idea of parceling off Palestinian villages through permanent redistricting arose out of the government’s temporary measures to clamp down on the attacks of the stabbing intifada. In October 2015, after a violent couple of weeks in Jerusalem, the Israeli government gave police discretion to impose a closure on certain East Jerusalem neighborhoods to monitor the movement of the city’s Palestinian population. The measures, which severely impeded freedom of movement—preventing people from going to work, children from going to school, businesses from receiving supplies and equipment, and halting critical municipal services—were justified by politicians and security officials as temporary measures necessary for maintaining security. Yet because of the residency status of the Jerusalemites and how intertwined the populations of Jerusalem are, closure was impossible to sustain by policing power alone.
The history of Israel’s sophisticated systems of population management in the West Bank should have served then as a warning that even temporary closures on the Palestinian neighborhoods of Jerusalem can have lasting political consequences. This type of process, in which temporary measures become a permanent fixture of the logic and justification of the legal system, sheds light on what I call the routinization of emergency, a feature of colonial bureaucracy in which exceptions to the rule become part of the administrative system, even when they may have been unimaginable prior to a particular crisis. Those few weeks of closure instituted the logic of a unilateral disengagement from East Jerusalem and the creation of a permit regime.
The term “permit regime” refers to a bureaucratic apparatus of the occupation modeled around that which developed in the West Bank between the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 through the early 2000s, when the separation barrier made West Bank residents increasingly dependent on permits from the Israeli army’s Civil Administration for movement within the West Bank, as well as for permission to enter Israel.
Another critical aspect of the permit regime is the way permits are used for recruiting informants for the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, which also operates in the West Bank. Desperate Palestinians are offered permits in exchange for providing intelligence information to the agency. While the majority of permit holders are not collaborators, the suspicion, atomization, and lack of trust in the West Bank—particularly of permit holders—is a result of these practices. Leveraging permits as a method of recruiting collaborators is as old as the state itself, but the permit regime turned the recruitment of informants into a wholesale, inherent operation of the bureaucracy of the occupation, producing fear and coercion on a massive scale that affects every family in the West Bank.
The history of Israel’s sophisticated systems of population management in the West Bank should have served then as a warning.
Today the Israeli government appears intent on expanding this permit regime to incorporate Jerusalem residents as well. As of last month, the Israeli government is promoting a law proposed by Deputy Minister Zeev Ekin, whose goal is to exclude eight Palestinian neighborhoods and administratively expel a third, which, taken together, affects over 120,000 families from the municipality of Jerusalem (for more details on this plan, see Ir Amim’s policy paper on these proposals). What this would mean is that Jerusalemites would not lose their status as residents, but they would lose their standing as residents of Jerusalem. Residency would still entail access to some social rights, but spatially, they would be excluded from the city. It would also mean they would be entirely subjected to the permit regime, for even though they would carry identity cards and not permits, the effects would be similar.
The Israeli Labor Party has proposed an even more draconian law, styled in newspeak as “a plan for a Jewish and democratic Jerusalem,” that would exclude all of the Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem that are behind the wall from the municipality in addition to annulling their residency status.
This reshaping of the city through tactics borrowed from the bureaucracy of the occupation developed over the course of half a century in the West bank turns population management through brief acts of rezoning into a silent and insidious weapon of war.
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